His name was Scoggin
and, since he’d died
Five hundred years
and more ago, we’d meet
For coffee near Union Square. The baristas
All smiled at him,
waving off his attempts
To pay them in
badly-minted old coins.
Last night he was
whittling a chain of links
Out of an ivory
scrap he’d found somewhere.
“For a child,” he
said when I sat next to him,
“She’ll dream of it some
night and wake up
Holding it in her
hand – the left, I expect.
She’ll go places the
Fates intend her not to.”
I objected; he
expected it of me. “But I’ve read
That the Gods
themselves cannot defy the Fates.”
“So they cannot,
being gods. Dead jesters, though,
Are not wholly
subject to the Fates.
Makes them crazy; especially her with the shears.”
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